How does Wild work?

How does wild work?

My name is David, I am known as GuidoFubini/ScrollingDoob in game and I have been at the top of the rankings multiple times. In this guide I will try to concisely tell you how Wild works.

I have split the explanation into two segments:

Simple Summary

In depth explanation with strategic advice

Segment 1: Simple Summary

You can sacrifice for Wild in every deck that has at least two factions.

You need at least 1 resource of every faction in your deck before you can sacrifice for Wild.

You can sacrifice for Wild up to double the amount of the resource you have least of.

You can use Wild to pay for every scroll or effect of every faction.

Segment 2: In depth explanation

In the following segment I will talk about:

How does the "Wild“ resource work (this time with examples)?

How does Wild help with the general problem of multi-resourcing?

What are some strategic things to keep in mind?

As you know, there are four different factions in Scrolls. The starter decks only contain scrolls of a single faction, but it is possible to include as many in your deck as you want. In the past there have been some very successful multi-resource decks in scrolls, but until now the majority of decks stayed with one faction. A bit more on that later.
First off, lets look at the functionality of Wild in a bit more detail.

How can we get Wild?

Right now there are three ways to get the wild resource:

Sacrificing for it

The Replenish ability

The scroll Grave Gruel

Replenish is an ability that gives you Wild as current resource, so you only will have it for one turn.
Sacrificing for it on the other hand, is the standard way to get Wild.

You can sacrifice for Wild in every deck that contains scrolls from at least two different factions, but there are some conditions for sacrificing. While you can get your normal resources as much and as often as you want, you need at least one resource of every faction from your deck before you can get your first wild resource. Also the amount of Wild can never get higher than double the amount of the resource you have the least of. So if you have for example 2 Growth, 4 Energy and 1 Decay in a deck with only Growth, Energy and Decay scrolls, you can get a maximum of 2 Wild. If you want to sacrifice for more Wild, you will need to get more Decay first. 2 Growth, 4 Energy and 2 Decay will allow for 4 Wild. So we now know how and how much Wild we can get.

Now that we know how much Wild we can get, how can we use this resource?

Whereas you can use a Growth resource only to play a Growth scroll, you can use a Wild resource for every scroll of every faction. That means, having 2 Wild, 3 Growth, 1 Energy allows you to play a Growth scroll with cost 5, or an Energy Scroll with cost 3. You see immediately, that this gives you great flexibility on how you can spend your resources every turn.
There is a little drawback, in that Wild does not count towards your surge value and that regular resources will be spent first and for example Replicaton does not count your wild resources, but it is usually always best to max Wild.
Another little thing to keep in mind, especially for deck building:
Getting 1 resource of the second faction, will allow you to play scrolls with cost up to 3 of that faction if you max Wild.
Getting 2 resources of the second faction, will allow you to play scrolls with cost up to 5 of that faction if you max Wild, and so on.

Although, the functionality of Wild is now hopefully explained enough, I want to write a few lines on multi-resource decks.

There have been a few successful two faction decks and maybe even a three faction deck, but there are a few big problems with that in scrolls.
Let's look at a very easy example: You build a Growth judgement deck and you hardly get enough scrolls to keep it pure Growth. So you think about adding a few cheap spells of, let's say, Order.
Let's assume you played a few turns and got to 5 Growth. You have a focus in hand and want to decide if it is worth to sacrifice for Order now to buff a creature and kill an opponent unit with your focus. Here is where the problem occurs: Even though you probably won't hurt your tempo if you have 5 Growth already and you will get instant value with the scroll you want to play, sacrificing for Order means losing 2 scrolls. That on the other hand means, that for it to be worth it, the focus has to give you +2 scroll advantage. Killing the creature only gets you even. That is why it is very hard to justify the second faction based on scroll advantage. And in fact, in judgement it used to be a lot better to just play bad scrolls of the main factions than great ones of a second in 99% of the cases.
A second problem is of course that there are not a lot of synergy effects for most of the faction combinations, so you don't get a lot of value naturally out of multi-resourcing.
Therefore, the successful multi-resouce decks in the past have been mostly late-game decks (GO Draw and the ED deck that destroyed everything for instance) that had room for a lot of ramp scrolls that would give you resources, like memorials (or Energy Syphon and Darkstrike in the ED deck).
Mojang stated clearly that they would like multi-resource decks to be stronger or equal than mono-faction ones, and Wild should help with that.

While we don't yet have a lot of synergy between factions, Wild does help a lot when it comes to resource management and the built in scroll disadvantage that I tried to explain above.
While it is still hard for aggressive mid-range decks justifying a tempo loss with sacrificing for a different resource in the early turns, decks with a bit more late-game potential should be able to get away with a second resource type in their deck.

But now, enough of this! Get going and build those sweet decks, Scrolldiers!